Half Dome Silhouette, Yosemite National Park

After nearly two years away, I finally made it back to my favorite place in the world, Yosemite National Park, this last weekend. I tell everyone I can to simply Go To Yosemite - it's easy to find reasons not to, but if you have the means I can't recommend it enough. I tried to live up to that myself, and made a trip with my wife, albeit briefly, this last weekend.

Unlike just about every other day I've spent in the park, neither of the days this last weekend seemed to have particularly colorful sunrises or sunsets, so some of the photographs I'd envisioned for the trip never really materialized. One thing I hoped to capture were some of the iconic views of the park in silhouette against colorful pre-dawn skies. After waiting in a meadow near Curry Village through the sunrise on Sunday morning without any color materializing, I turned my attention to shooting the profile of Glacier Point instead. Once I'd stopped looking up at Half Dome, my wife pointed out that the tiny bit of overcast cloud in the sky transformed into this great hatched pattern. While not the colorful sky I'd envisioned, it made for the interesting sky I'd hoped for to complement the silhouette of Half Dome above.

By this point in the morning, the sun was up and the scene was actually fairly light. I kept the exposure time down, and added a 2-stop ND Grad filter as well. I also bumped the ISO to 400 to keep the shutter speed shorter to help ensure a sharp edge to the silhouette. I hope to add more Yosemite photos soon, but may wait until some of my large format film comes back as well. It was fantastic to be back in Yosemite, and as always my message to anyone reading this remains the same - go to Yosemite!

Nikon D90 | Nikon 18-200VR@42mm | f/8 | 1/800s | ISO400 | Handheld

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